faire une pipe

A while ago I received a message from the Chair of our department with the title “your webpage.” (See infra for the full text.)

What’s wrong with my webpage <zouhairghazzal.com>?

Loyola had at the time accepted that my webpage be directly linked to the departmental webpage, that is, my name links me directly to my personal page which carries my own domain-name, hence contrary to what the Chair’s email falsely claims, this is not “your LUC webpage”: I’ve designed it myself over 10 years ago, and it does not sit on the Loyola servers in Chicago. In fact, it is hosted by the Yahoo Small Business unit.

When I did the initial design once I moved to Rome for a year in 2001–02, the year the Manhattan Twin Towers went down, Loyola did at the time host my webpage, and I used to update it regularly, that is, until 2006–07 when updating became a real annoyance: every once and a while the page was “locked” under an administrator’s name, and it had to be “unlocked” simply to add a photo or a text. When I thought that enough is enough (I disliked also that the “address” was too long, ugly, and could not be easily memorized), I created the above domain-name and moved everything to the new website.

The point here is that Loyola has nothing whatsoever to do with this personal webpage of mine. So why was the Chair frustrated? Because “someone” from the “Loyola community” got “offended” that on my Flickr portfolio <http://www.flickr.com/photos/zghazzal/> there is (female) nudity. Actually, to be specific, the message below did not specify what the “problem” really was with the “four images” “in the vicinity” of the link below—nudity (male or female) or otherwise. One has to go to the link to see what the “problem” might be: nudity, indecency, sexual intercourse, penetration (or lack thereof), blow-jobs, and so on. The fact that the “problem” is unnamed but only alluded to is a fundamental aspect of the accusation by this or those anonymous person or persons from the so-called “Loyola community.” Forget about freedom of speech, the first amendment, and academic freedom, you only feel within a “community” once you’re accused of a felony or crime. We’ve known for some time that institutions of higher learning in the United States are Foucauldian in their essence, with a high degree of scrutinization, and with a lot of empty homogeneous time and resources at their disposal. Thus the dumb hypocritical bureaucracy must be running mad in its paper work, servers, viruses and malware, and paranoia, fearing that it would lose its grip on its “audience,” “community,” and “Jesuit education.”

Notice here that my Flickr account is unrelated to Loyola, and that on my webpage there is a link to Flickr only under “photography”; to repeat, both webpages are not hosted by Loyola, but by Yahoo.

“The ones who have generated complaints,” as the text below says, did not generate their complaints to me personally—say, be email—but to the Chair. Not only such decent people prefer to remain unnamed and anonymous, but their complaints only point to an image, which we’ll have to assume “contains” something “indecent” into it, to the point that it must be permanently “deleted,” as the text urges me to do, so that the unnamed “problem” would not reach the ears of the higher officials at Loyola.

The image to which the link below refers to is composed of frames within frames, which are framed with a single “final” frame—that of my camera’s viewfinder. There is the frame of a cheap reproduction of a painting by the Belgian René Magritte. The painting is quite well known and world famous, “Ceci n’est pas une pipe,” This is not a pipe, to which Michel Foucault had devoted a small penetrating book on the ambiguities of language. The painting is indeed a meditation on language: “this is not a pipe” is technically correct because what we see is a painting that represents a pipe, hence as a representation of a pipe “is” not a pipe—per se. The being-of-a-pipe should be taken strongly as one of existence-of-a-thing, its being what it is. But then we know damn well that this is a pipe in the sense that the representation of the pipe still makes it a pipe, that we can all acknowledge it as such without problem. Notice, however, how in the title, “this is not a pipe,” the “not” negates the “is,” as if in an act of defiance to the very existence of the object—and to being and time in general. Moreover, it is the very juxtaposition of the representation-as-image with language which, in the final instance, negates the existence of the represented object, leaving it to an object-of-representation that marks the sublime beauty of this unique work of art of the twentieth century.

Magritte seems to have been under the influence of the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913) whose view of language operated under the separation of the signifier from the signified. If the signifier is the “sign”—the linguistic word—which designates a “content,” the signified object, then the relation between signifier and signified remains problematic. For example, if I say “tree”—acting as signifier—the signified in this instance is nothing else but the “image” of a “tree” that I have in mind at the moment—not the “real tree.” I can, of course, designate a “real tree” out there to show to my hearer what a “tree” “is.” But the way we generally (unconsciously) use language is through abstract associations and representations. Every word “makes sense” not by designating a concrete object, but by “defining” it through other words and designated objects. Which renders any “tight association” between signifier and signified a bit problematic, to say the least.

This is precisely what, for example, American abstractionism of the first few decades of the twentieth century has perfectly seized. Artists like Marc Rothco and Jackson Pollock have seized the moment of the “separation” of signified and signifier to declare the non-necessity of figurative art, an art that paints something that is out there, and hence transforms it into a mere object of representation. Abstractionist paintings do not “represent” anything in particular anymore. The representation, if any, must be thought of abstractly or conceptually.

That’s—briefly—regarding the first “frame” in my photograph. The second “frame” consists of a still from a film running on a TV-monitor, presumably from a DVD machine, and what we see—at face value—is a woman giving a blow-job to a man. We only see the face of the woman but not that of the man, whose only erect penis is within the frame. What’s interesting here is that the wo(man) is gazing at the man’s invisible gaze, which, being excluded from the frame we can only imagine—the spectator filling the gap.

The film clip is from a short by Argentinian director Gaspar Noé who became well known with Irréversible. It is its “juxtaposition” with Magritte’s painting that gives it resonance. The frames within frames. Magritte’s painting is only a cheap reproduction of the original, covered in glass with a black frame. Nöé’s film clip by contrast is framed within a monitor, and the two frames have been framed through a camera’s viewfinder and presented as such to the spectator.

Does the title-caption give any clues? The French “faire un pipe,” to do a pipe, simply means in common jargon “blow-job” (léchouille). I leave it to your imagination to decide.

Zouhair:

It has been brought to my attention that some of the images connected to your LUC webpage are objectionable to some in the university community.  Would it be possible for you to remove them?

The relevant images are on page 5-6 of the Flickr page.  There may be others, but those are the ones that have generated complaints to me.  The four images in the vicinity of the link below are most relevant.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/zghazzal/5659574189/in/photostream

If the photos are not removed and complaints are made to higher officials in the university, your page may be removed from the university site.

Thanks.

Tim

Timothy J. Gilfoyle

Professor and Chair of History, Loyola University Chicago

Associate Editor, Journal of Urban History

tgilfoy@luc.edu

truth claims, avowal, and evidence

Truth claims, avowal, auto-biography, and madness in the construction of criminality in contemporary Syria

Zouhair Ghazzal

Loyola University Chicago

zghazza@luc.edu

In the Syrian penal system, which closely follows the French model of evidence, a judge constructs evidence based on forensic reports, interviews of and statements delivered by suspects and witnesses, and memos drafted by judges, lawyers, doctors, and other professionals appointed by the court in the course of the investigation; all of which constitute truth claims, as constructed by the judge from the vintage viewpoint of his or her own narrative. In other words, statements taken individually would be problematic in terms of receiving their validity through factual evidence alone. If they do not stand on their own, it is because their validity would only be established through the judge’s narrative.

There is, however, another twist to the matter, as judges would be unable—or at the very least, feel embarrassed—to deliver their verdict without the accused openly making an avowal: I did what you have suspected me of doing, and that is the truth of the matter. That kind of avowal (confession?), in its religious Christian underpinnings, becomes normative in the secular European penal systems of the nineteenth century. The avowal opens that unavoidable gap in our understanding of the act and the subject behind the act, an attitude that led to the outsourcing of juridical opinions in the direction of doctors and psychiatrists. Tell me who you are, and why you did it, became the motto of judges towards their suspects and accused. Because such calls to truth could not be answered once and for all, judges had to give up some of their authority in favor of opinions delivered by doctors and psychiatrists. A declaration of insanity was good enough to halt the verdict, as required by law (again, following precepts adopted by the French Code pénal since 1832), whereby the accused would be sent to a psychiatric institution rather than be incarcerated in a prison cell.

One could argue, by tracing the discursive archeology and genealogy of the penitentiary to its European nineteenth-century roots, that the transformation of the avowal as the sine qua non of evidence prior to verdict was probably related to the association of penance to the prison system. It was not enough to incarcerate people for wrongdoing, as the prison experience must carry with it the weight of rehabilitation: We have to know the subject, who he is, for the rehabilitation process to be successful. Penance, in its Christian medieval underpinnings, assumes a process of voluntary self-punishment inflicted as an outward expression of repentance for having done wrong: the prison would then become that public penance for having done wrong. But it was not enough, however, for “society,” as represented by the judge, to know who did commit the hideous act: the avowal of the culprit became normative across the penal system.

What is striking here is the parallelism to be drawn between the juridical and the medical. “I am mad”: The avowal becomes the key component in the psychiatric process, without which there would be no contract between the patient and medical authorities. Hence the patient must himself seal the conditions of his incarceration in a medical institution. In similar vein, a suspect, prior to becoming an accused, must declare that “I did commit the crime that I was accused of.” In both instances, the act creates the contract, while in civil law the contract establishes an obligation that is consensual.

Behind such exigencies, from both the juridical and medical instances, lies a long history of avowal, one that is associated with “telling the truth” (dire vrai) in general, and, more specifically, “telling the truth of oneself” (dire vrai sur soi-même), both of which could be traced back to their Greek, Roman, and Christian origins. With all the exigencies towards “objectivism” to be found in both the juridical and medical science, what brings them together is that strange requirement of the discourse of the culprit/patient on him(her)self. Hence between the judge and the culprit lies the discourse of the culprit, the knowledge that the latter has on him(her)self. Similarly, between doctor and patient lies the truth that the patient would reveal on him(her)self. The declaration itself could be understood as speech act, but it exceeds it in the sense that, at least in penal proceedings, it could constitute the tragic climax of court hearings. Avowal is by definition associated with “telling the truth,” as it does not make much sense to declare that what I’m telling you is not the truth. The question then becomes to understand the implications behind such practice of telling the truth, and how it paves the way towards the penitentiary, as opposed to the mere experience of the prison. The broader implication is that of governmentality, that is, the political control of society as a whole.

To wit, an avowal is a “total” contractual obligation between speaker and hearer, in the sense that it is the entire “culture” of a society that is at stake. How people speak to one another, how they make a confession, how they deny a previous statement, are not simply a product of a “situated encounter,” but transcend it to what the archeology of knowledge in a certain culture has produced over its long history.

In Arabic, avowal usually stands for iʿtirāf, whose root is the verb iʿtarafa, to avow, to confess (which tends to be the former in a secular setting like a court hearing). The other parallel term is that of iqrār, from the root verb of aqarra, to acknowledge, to declare. However, even though the two terms of iʿtirāf and iqrār seem to be (wrongly) used interchangeably in the court literature, even by judges themselves, they should not be confused. In effect, the iʿtirāf carries that strong sense of “telling the truth” in an exercise of self-revelation; iqrār by contrast is an act of acknowledging which could be “read” or “interpreted” as such by a judge from a series of statements delivered by a suspect or witness. It hence lacks that direct self-avowal.

It is beyond our purposes to trace back the genealogical connotations of such concepts throughout the history of Arab and Islamicate societies and civilizations. What we can do for our purposes here is to see how such notions operate in the context of the contemporary Syrian courts, that is to say, how they have been transplanted, adopted, and assimilated in order to understand their juridical and political connotations in a developing state like Syria. (One could indeed argue that practices of self-examination, whereby an internalized belief must be externalized in relation to an authority that would provide its “approval,” is indeed absent in Islam; or for that matter a “hermeneutics of the self” is absent altogether.

A judge in the city of Idlib (north of Syria) made the following remarks in a memo he drafted regarding a woman who was accused of killing her husband (allegedly helped by her brother) in the late 1980s, problematizing “avowal” into six broad categories.

1.     A judicial avowal must be descriptive, personal, frank, and emanating from a free will, while at the same time in accordance with reality.

2.     When there is a denial to the original avowal, as was the case here with both prime suspects, having denied in the presence of a military prosecutor most of what they had stated earlier, the earlier avowal could still stand as valid, in particular if the denial would create an implausible reality, that is, a “view contrary to the accepted reality (khilāf li-l-ḥaqīqa al-rāsikha).” In our case here, it would have been implausible that the victim would have died either in an act of suicide or targeted by assassins other than the two suspects.

3.     An avowal must be devoid of confusions, ambiguities, contradictions, and in no need of manipulated interpretations to become intelligible down to its finest particulars (juzʾiyyāt).

4.     An avowal could also be implicit (iʿtirāf ḍimnī) in the sense that the suspect avoided any direct acknowledgment of a truth, but nevertheless her statements, when interpreted in conjunction with other statements, either by the same suspect or by another witness, could bear the light of a hidden acknowledgment.

5.     In all the above instances, it would be therefore up to the judge to decipher a genuine confession from a faked one, or perceive an acknowledgment in the process of an interview or a police report, and contrary to what the defense attorney in our case here had repeatedly stated, denying an avowal (rujūʿ ʿan iʿtirāf) is not enough for the judge to drop the confession in question, as the denial itself could be devoid of any truth.

6.     Finally, the aim of all this tedious but essential work in sorting out avowals and acknowledgments would be to determine for each homicidal case “the cause of the killing (al-bāʿith fi-l-qatl),” considering that “each criminal act is in need of a motive (dāfiʿ).”

Even though taken out of context from the factualities of the crime in question, such assertions are nonetheless normative enough to reveal the discourse that stands in Syrian courts when it comes to avowal, and more broadly, evidence.

What does it mean that an avowal must be frank and emanating from a free will? One obvious interpretation is that an avowal must not be delivered under duress, otherwise “telling the truth” would become meaningless. But, a more deeper explanation would look in relation to the revelation of the self, the fact that what is revealed in an avowal is that inner self, or as the judge stated in item 6 above, the fact that every crime has a “motive” or “cause”: identifying the killer is not enough, if the motive is not there yet. What else would provide us with the motive but the avowal from the one who presumably committed the act of killing? We therefore need to understand why the discourse of the accused must, in the last resource, come at the rescue of the objectivity of the juridical discourse; and why, at times, when the defendant is unable to fill that gap, psychiatric and medical discourse is there to fill that silence. Moreover, defendants, at times, in the solitary confinement of their prison cell, draft “letters” on their own, addressed to family members, friends, confidants, or even counsels and judges, which on their own pose additional problems at identifying the meaning of avowals as speech acts. Where do auto-biographical statements fit? What role should we accord to them?

But then all those truth-claims need to be detected by someone, hence the importance of the judge’s discretionary powers; or, as item 5 above states, it is “up to the judge” to make distinctions, to decipher a genuine confession from a faked one, or an implicit avowal from one that seems more straightforward, or whether a denial should be accepted as such. More importantly, it is up to the judge to construct the “motive” of the crime, as without this dāfiʿ the judicial process would be devoid of its substance. In all this, therefore, the judge acts as a “hearer” in the face of a suspect-speaker of sorts, a suspect who at the end of a hearing may have said very little, or nothing at all. To relieve himself from such deadlock, the judge may at the end seek psychiatric help for his suspect, but, whatever the outcome, all discretionary powers are in his hands.

At times avowals could be frank and startling, as if there is too much into them in a very little space:

I confess of having committed the crime of killing my mother. The reason was that my mother kept interfering with my marital life, forbidding me from filing for a divorce from my husband. I was also aware that my mother and sisters were having sex with my husband. I reiterate all previous statements [to the police and public prosecution].

This was a woman speaking to an investigating judge in his office at Aleppo’s Palace of Justice in 1996. She will also inform him that prior to killing her mother she had burned her own home, then went to her mother’s house to spend the night, woke up early in the morning, took a hammer from the kitchen and killed her mother in her sleep by smashing her skull.

Notwithstanding the horror of such scenes, the young woman, Fatima, a mother of a teenage boy, drafted a letter to a family member while serving in her prison cell.

To my paternal cousin Muhammad ‘Ali Shawwa Abu ‘Abdo,[1] hoping that when you’ll receive this missive you’ll be in good health, as God wishes. In case you’d care to ask, I’m doing well, and the only thing that I miss is seeing my dear son Sami Shawwa.[2] I also want you to talk to my brothers so that they would drop their lawsuit against me, and to get me out of my prison. I can’t take it anymore, as I’m on the verge of committing another crime in prison. I’m unable to live here far away from my son Sami, as I’m unable to adapt to this situation in such circumstances. Tell them that if they don’t drop their lawsuit against me so that I get out of here, I’ll arrange for them seas of blood—not a single sea only—and I can do that from my prison, and not only in talk.

Besides the fact that such gruesome passages look startling, if not embarrassing, it is not clear what judges do with them. The above passage is taken from a long letter that the accused had drafted to her cousin while in prison, a copy of which was in the dossier that was used by the judge for his verdict. The discretionary powers of the judge were here, as they always are, enormous. The judge could have, for instance, asked for psychiatric evaluation, but he did not, probably because neither prosecution nor defense pushed for such request. More importantly, however, was what he precisely did with such written “testimony,” as there was no indication that he effectively used it in his verdict; but then it could have had impacted him without openly addressing the issue. The point here is that such “testimonies” which play the role of “avowals” even more strongly than “normal avowals” would do, may, in the final analysis, not receive even a casual mention in the verdict. Even by law, the question of their inclusion remains indeed problematic, as these are statements delivered in writing but only in the privacy of the culprit, hence nothing was uttered in public, within the format of the usual line of questioning. Which begs the question, why are they then included in the dossier? What difference would that make?

What such question reveal is the fundamental problematic that we have posed at the beginning of this survey, namely, that the avowal has become in nineteenth-century Europe the centerpiece of the criminal dossier, in that “telling the truth,” the discourse of the culprit, must come from the subject him(her)self. In sum, the discourse of judges and doctors, though necessary, is not enough. What we need to question, therefore, is, through an analysis of dossiers, how the avowal has become the centerpiece of evidence, what role does it serve, and the deadlocks that the system has placed upon itself with such requirement.

References

Abi Samra, Muḥammad, Mawt al-abad al-sūrī. Shahādāt jīl al-ṣamt wa-l-thawra [The Death of Syria’s Eternity. Testimonies of the Silence and Revolution Generation], Beirut: Riad el-Rayyes Books, 2012.

ʿAwwā, Muḥammad Salim al-, Fi uṣūl al-niẓām al-jinā’i al-Islāmi, 2nd. ed., Cairo: Dar al-Maʿārif, 1983 [1979].

Dulong, Renaud, ed., L’aveu. Histoire, sociologie, philosophie, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2001.

Fahmy, Khaled, "The Anatomy of Justice: Forensic medicine and criminal law in nineteenth-century Egypt," Islamic Law and Society 6, no. 2 (1999): 224-71.

Foucault, Michel, Mal faire, dire vrai. Fonction de l’aveu en justice, Presses Universitaires de Louvain, 2012.

Foucault, Michel, La société punitive. Cours au Collège de France, 1972–1973, Paris: EHESS–Gallimard–Seuil, 2013.

Garapon, Antoine, Bien juger. Essai sur le rituel judiciaire, Paris: Éditions Odile Jacob, 1997.

Ghazzal, Zouhair, The Grammars of Adjudication, Beirut: Ifpo, 2007.

Ghazzal, Zouhair, The Crime of Writing, Beirut: Ifpo, 2015, forthcoming.

ʿUṭrī, Mamdūḥ, Qānūn al-ʿuqūbāt, Damascus: Muʾassasat al-Nuri, 1993.

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[1] Muhammad ‘Ali was the brother of Fatima’s husband, hence her brother-in-law. If, as she claims, he was her “paternal cousin,” then Fatima and husband must have also been paternal cousins. There is a possibility, however, that they were “cousins” only in the figurative sense of the term, that is, not as a real blood relationship.

[2] Referring to both son and cousin by their full names has something impersonal about it, diminishing its intimacy, as if the letter was meant to be read not by the recipient himself, but by some anonymous judicial authority.

dept. of education

Chicago, 5 April 2013

Dear Dean Reinhard Andress,

Thank you for receiving me in your office in mid-March, and I apologize for the delay in responding to your email.

During our conversation, I made it clear that a major reason for my reluctance to submit my annual assessment form to the Chair of the History Department since January 2010 was the unwillingness of our department to make public the relevant data that would correlate teaching evaluations with grading and other matters.

In the last few years, beginning with the departmental committee report that evaluated my request for promotion to the rank of professor, and further assessments by the Chair, the students’ evaluations have become the most contentious issue. In our meeting last month, you read to me what you perceived as “negative comments” by the students, and in your letter you mention that “your teaching is problematical because of a significant number of negative comments by students.” And you add that “I see you as not fully complying with your teaching responsibilities.” First of all, I don’t know what “significant” means here, since the department has failed to provide us with any relevant figures that would correlate evaluations, grading, and the quality of teaching. In effect, since the students’ evaluations have become computerized around 2005–06 through a new system, I’ve requested from the Chairs of our department to provide us with relevant data that would situate the evaluations for each professor in relation to his or her colleagues. Such data would include at the very minimum the class average for grading and assessment; the standard deviation for each course/seminar and the overall average; the correlation between each professor’s performance and that of the department; and the distribution of grades for individual courses and seminars and the department as a whole.

To wit, there is a national problem of grade inflation, well documented in the academic and journalistic literatures, and to which the department and university are willingly not paying much attention. Consequently, those of us who have our courses and seminars structured on rigorous readings and grading of papers and assignments are punished for not fitting with the mysterious and unpublicized “general curve” of grading and behaving. It is no secret, however, notwithstanding absent data about grading and the performance of students and their professors, that 50 percent of Loyola’s students fail to receive their bachelor degrees within the four-year period normally assigned to them, and that this may in turn point to a major structural weakness in the performance of students, in spite of Loyola’s lenient requirements.

Should professors like myself, who have been at the service of the university for 20 years, be punished just few years before their retirement, simply for assigning first-class readings, and for providing rigorous comments and grading to their students’ papers? During our conversation in your office, you have quoted what you perceive as so-called “negative comments” by some of my students, which were randomly accumulated by the departmental Chair. Besides the fact that such statements would only produce circumstantial and anecdotal evidence at best, they should not be used for purposes of tenure/promotion and the renewal of contracts, unless, of course, they are substantiated by statistical evidence for the totality of courses and seminars offered by the department in a semester. Moreover, the so-called “negative comments” are taken for granted for what is perceived as negative. When, for example, a student claims that “the professor’s lectures are too long and incomprehensible,” shouldn’t we inquire further and check whether this student has read the assignment, cares about the content of the assignment (the assigned book), and if so, whether his/her dissatisfaction stems from any differences of interpretation, or is indicative of something else? Or when a student claims that “the essay’s prompt is vague, if not incomprehensible,” shouldn’t we pursue the question further and ask her whether she has read the texts upon which the prompt was based? And if so, does she care about the texts she has read? Do they mean anything to her?

Why are you confronting me only with the negatives? Why not look at what “positive” comments have to say, and, again, confront such comments with a rigorous test of quality in order to see what they have in turn to say about what Loyola has to offer—or what it fails to offer?

There is the desire of a consumer society to avoid learning curves. This tends to result in dumbed-down products that are easily started but compromised in value and application. Shouldn’t we contrast this with teaching experiences that do have learning curves, but pay off well and allow students and teachers to become well versed in reading and writing? For over 20 years I’ve committed myself to demanding learning curves in my writing and teaching, and I want to pursue along that path.

Sincerely,

Zouhair Ghazzal

Professor of historical and social sciences

Department of History

zghazza@luc.edu

Post-Scriptum:

Regarding my writing and research, I prefer to be read rather than simply graded. For that purpose I made public all my contributions since 2009–10:

http://luc.academia.edu/ZouhairGhazzal

Additional material is available here:

http://zouhairghazzal.com/

femmes

Beirut, the week before the new year

I did not write in the first place. I was not (into) writing at all. I could not do it, nor commit to it. I was not reading much either. Not until I went to college, and it was that complete fiasco of entering into college as a bio-chemistry (premed) major that forced me into excessive reading, then, much later, into wanting to be a writer. The disconnection with society and the world-at-large could not be anymore concealed. Rather it is, indeed, the sine qua non of my shattered existence, or of my parlêtre, as Lacan would say, meaning that being-into-language. What I like about Lacan is that he does not conceive language as a “tool” for “communication,” but as an entity inscribed within the body, without which the body would be shapeless and motionless. That it hasn’t been revealed earlier, in my teens, is a constant source of regret. Was I too docile back then, wearing a mask-of-satisfaction, like a protective shell, that I did not believe in? Is it a character flaw? But even the disaster of the college experience—from its first weeks—did not propel that urge to write. With the urge to read there was no urge to write yet. That damn sense of urgency, that writing should matter more than oxygen, was not there. We tend to think modern Arabic through a détour—that we learn “it,” we learn its potentials, by going through the other major Latin languages: French, English, and to some, German. We learn modernity from the potentials of the likes of French and English; then come back to Arabic as a language of “lacks” of sorts, assuming we ever come back to it. Maybe we’ve abandoned it in the first place, with no desire to learn it, to be-with-Arabic. If language is the house of being, as Heidegger has claimed, then we’re into an orphaned culture without language. This Arabic which has stubbornly maintained itself for more than fifteen centuries, beginning with the notorious poetic and pre-Islamic seven muᶜallaqāt, gives us that feeling of inaccessibility. The Jāhiliyya of the muᶜallaqāt had at least a sense of community, because some of the best poems of the time were “hanged” on the Kaᶜba, which was allegedly a pagan monument, prior to passing to the prophetic hands. I should have done the same since high school, with an urgent sense to write for a (virtual) community. I’ve learned since then to procrastinate and defer endlessly—defer the writing process. When I did my first book, I wrote it in French, but I was ill at ease in the whole process. Not much of a jouissance, not even the modicum of pleasure. I had the writing of the likes of Foucault and Braudel in mind, but had no idea where to situate my first serious project on the political economy of Damascus. Which is precisely the cultural and political problem of the eastern Mediterranean: the absence of a viable narrative, something that would make sense at least for the last couple centuries. I want a prose that makes me feel “one” with the city; I want to feel that I belong to it; and that she belongs to me. Instead, I happen to come and go like a stranger. There is a notion of stranger that I do not mind, propounded by the German sociologist Georg Simmel: a stranger is not only someone who must learn the shared codes of society, but, more importantly, he is seen by others as having “not yet” learned those norms, that he is not one of us, and will never be. But then no one would take you seriously if you simply learn the norms, adapt, and behave well. The stranger must reveal the insidiousness of those norms, how treacherous and uncanny they are.

Hence this whole theory of my hands tied by divine ordinance, parental repression, fatherly superego which forbids jouissance, all of this does not make sense. I was not into writing to begin with, and this has been an agony ever since I’ve realized the importance of writing, of believing in it, of investing into and being committed into it. It’s like being in love: to give what we don’t have to someone who does not want it. Because such a mindset was not there to begin with, say, as a teenager, where it should have all begun, it has always been an agony. Going public has also been another of those agonizing experiences. Instead of repression pure and simple, we should think in terms of shame, anxiety, castration of the body.

Think of photography in terms of the relationship between the object produced by the photograph and the reality of the setting. Ultimately, there is no reality outside the artifact of the object. Likewise, the signifier does not represent a trace of reality, but represents a subject which makes its apparition into the real, by effacing the original trace, while substituting itself into the infinite chain of signifiers that make reality possible—comprehensible by being discursive.

At a downtown bookstore my eyes caught the title of a just published French novel: “the artist of sex.” In one passage picked at random, the mother tells her daughter that men are miles away from women, will never figure out how to bring them to sexual jouissance—not even pleasure. Forget therefore about the missionary position and its affiliates (so-called oral and anal sex, no such terms exist in French), as they won’t even bring even a modicum of pleasure. And the mother raves on: men would do better masturbating on their own, but they need the woman to exhort their masculinity and honor games. Ultimately, the daughter went for the artistry of sado-masochism, though it remains unclear if such move was at the mother’s exhortation. We see her commanding and receiving pain, though it could be only one way: I like receiving pain but not giving it, or vice versa. The woman as dominatrix, subjugating men to her desire—would that bring the much heralded jouissance of the flesh? Which reminds me of Talal Asad on judicial torture in the late middle ages, perhaps a transformation in the 12th and 13th centuries, if not earlier. Medieval Christian torture became a doctrinal necessity to “see” what was “inside” the flesh and soul, as if it was not enough to simply claim belief (as is the case in Islam), as the latter could not be externalized and offered for evaluation by the Other. The body is therefore subject to torture with the hope that it would deliver a certain truth, hence a system of symbolic utterances called knowledge of the soul (or self). Foucault who was into S&M himself wanted his sexual practices for the sheer pleasure of the flesh: but is that possible? Can sexuality be conceptualized outside discourse?

An Indian critic à la Chakrabarty, Aijaz Ahmad, notes how much Said’s Orientalism owes to the Foucauldian topology of epistemic systems, that of the “order of things,” whereby an epistemic structure is valid for a particular time-space framework. My problem with all this Orientalism saga is that it is not even concerned with the massive work that is needed to recover the essence of the third-world texts. Only when such work is done, only when such texts are taken seriously for their own sake, can we speak of a recovered modest dignity.

The smells of this city. Nothing like Damascus or Aleppo, the quintessential city of smells. Everything is more modest here. On a warm Saturday afternoon I took it to the back streets. Many shops had their electricity out, part of the daily three-hour-minimum rationing. That smell of being old: shops that belong to the 1950s and 1960s, simply because they are benefiting from the old-rent law. The oldness is a far cry from Aleppo, which still smells the Ottoman centuries. With my narcissistic psyche, I kept pondering, Why did I leave? Why did I go west? Too late perhaps, now that I’m “enjoying” the city—the jouissance of the pervert. What is it that I know now that I did not know then? Is it a question of knowledge? We do not progress as individuals; what time and duration bring to us is that “insertion” of present knowledge into a past where supposedly it was “not there” “yet.” But it was there—in an embryonic form—and that’s precisely what we appreciate: I love my fate, because it was all there from day one; I can now better appreciate why I did what I did. No regrets; only one failure after another. A friend of mine once gave me the greatest reward: Tu réussis tous tes échecs; you’re so damn good at succeeding in all your failures. So fucking French erotic!

On the long run we’ll all be dead. On the short run, however, even if we indulge into serious relationships, even if we’re committed, we’re at the end of the day alone. Yet, being alone-alone is not like being alone-in-a-relationship. The latter poses the fundamental question, What is it being-with-an-Other?, which the alone-alone would not even dare to question. How to “be” “with” that Other, whether another being, or non-being, remains the fundamental dilemma of our times.

I did not buy this story of the Wall Street broker who all of a sudden turns as photographer of prostitutes and drug users in the larger New York area in order to “discover” the existence of God in himself, like a medieval sufi, leaving behind all speculative wealth—and atheism. It seems that in both instances—from Wall Street to the drug addicts and the prostitutes—there is a jouissance of excess: from the excesses of speculative capital to those of the deterioration of body and soul. In both instances, however, there is that jouissance that emerges from the deterioration-as-excess. It could be reformulated as the “quest for excitement,” to use Norbert Elias’ formulation of sports in general. As to the photography on Flickr, it has a blatant voyeuristic element into it which could be termed “enjoying the pain of others.” The top photographers of the last century have come to realize that what remains outside the frame, and which is left at the viewer’s discretion, is equally important, if not more crucial, than what we see on the “screen” in front of us. In the photography depicting drug addicts and prostitutes in the New York area, we’re told in every frame that “there must be something important to see,” which is right in front of us, and, frankly, as a viewer, I find myself deprived of my imaginative powers, like bombarded with pornographic images. How is this related to God’s existence and religion? The thesis that there is an atheistic rupture between Wall Street and God neither makes sense historically nor sociologically. Max Weber has amply demonstrated the correlations between the Protestant ethic and capitalism. More importantly, the entire history of capitalism, since its inception in the Italian city-states in the 13th and 14th centuries points to a process of “accommodation” between the Church and capitalism, so that, for example, usury is “approved” in spite of earlier prohibitions in both Christianity and Judaism. So let’s not think even for a moment that our financial markets are godless! It is precisely because God is dead, that prohibitions are all over the place, that nothing is permitted. Because religion cannot serve anymore as that grandiose framework that encompasses all aspects of life, God must be exhausted at the sight of all those folks who turn towards him for help, like our broker-cum-photographer: God is in deep pain, not at the sight of drug addicts and prostitutes (he is not into social security), however, but at all those morons who “discover” him all of a sudden—asking for help, because they lost faith in the financial markets!

the syrian civil war

Is the current violence in Syria a revolt of “society” against an oppressive state, or should it be read more meaningfully as a full fledged civil war? If we assume the perspective of civil war, then the “state” and its various apparatuses would stand as just one “civil party” among others, protective of its own social and political interests, while revealing the multi-layered relations of power in Syrian society which cannot be solely attributed to a dysfunctional state–society relation. That is to say, even though the violence was originally meant to displace the apparatuses of the state, it has since then sprawled in different directions, not to be restricted to the problems of legitimacy that an authoritarian state has engulfed itself into since the Baathist revolution in the 1960s. It is such hypothesis that we want to explore, first, by contextualizing the antinomies of the Syrian nation-state in historical perspective, since its inception from the remnants of the Ottoman Empire and the French colonial state. Second, through a combination of sociological and anthropological approaches, we want to analyze the contradictions that the Baathist state has set itself into once it has opted for a hegemonic takeover of civil society, in particular in the 1970s, with Asad’s “corrective movement” and its aftermath, which led to a massive expansion of the state apparatuses.

The collapse of the old Ottoman order, both in its political and cultural connotations, established, amid the Sykes–Picot agreements in 1916, a British–French colonial order, which implied moving, quite abruptly, from Empire to nation-state. New states with colonial “borders” (“lines in the sand”) were thus formed, such as Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Jordan, Palestine and Kuwait, whose territories were previously set within the “frontiers” of a multi-ethnic empire. The post-Ottoman colonial order was therefore the first attempt to create a modern nation-state with that awkward combination of a sovereign state, supported by a national bourgeoisie of rentiers, manufacturers and financiers (the ex-Ottoman urban notables), which inevitably dominated politics and government. This colonial liberal order, which coopted the nascent national bourgeoisie into its ranks, persevered until the Second World War. The first indication of the displacement of such political and economic order was, indeed, the free officers revolution in Egypt in 1952, which other countries have replicated. With that single event the social roots of a would-be second political and economic order, which still dominates the region until now, and which apparently the current revolts are attempting to displace, was already there.

But are we ready for a third order? With Gamal Abdul Nasser coming to power in 1952, Egypt would opt for a series of statist measures that would ultimately establish themselves as a blueprint for the Arab world at large: the undermining of the power of the colonial bourgeoisie through methods of confiscation or nationalization of rural, urban, manufacturing, financial and educational assets. Which led to a state-controlled economy, where the state’s security is monopolized by an ever growing army, paramilitary groups, and intelligence services.

The dismantlement of the colonial liberal order was therefore quick to happen, and in Egypt that order was already fully reversed by the mid-1950s: by then Egypt, the most populous Arab country, was running under a massive civil and military bureaucracy where the role of the military (as epitomized by Nasser himself) and intelligence services had become paramount; where education and the economy were fully dominated by the statist bureaucracy; and where the peasantry, looked upon as suspicious for its conservatism and subjection to old landlord families, was subject to constant political mobilization. Such drastic processes, irreversibly anti-liberal, would serve as blueprint for the rest of the Arab world, and by the late 1950s other Arab countries would follow suit. In 1958 the coup of Abdul-Karim Qasim, another disgruntled officer, has put a sudden and bloody end to the rule of the Hashimite monarchy which had been ruling Iraq since the 1920s. In 1963 the Baath Party came to power in both Iraq and Syria, whose rule has been further brutally consolidated in the 1970s with Hafiz al-Asad in Syria and Saddam Hussein in Iraq. In 1969, a coup led by an unknown and young officer under the name of Mu‘ammar al-Gadhafi, damaged the long and stable rule of the Idrissi monarchy in Libya. By 1978–79 this “second political and economic order” was locked and further consolidated thanks to the Iranian revolution, which undermined the Pahlavi dynasty, and a tradition of Shi‘i monarchism since the early sixteenth century, instituting an Islamic Republic for the first time in the Middle East and West Asia.

This brief recapitulation of events should remind us of the frailty of the colonial bourgeois order that was established in the wake of the dismantlement of the Ottoman Empire: if that order has been reversed all too easily, in a series of coups d’états across the region, and through blunt statist measures intended to weaken the private economies, it was only because of the puniness of that order, which could be attributed to Ottoman times, and to the way the old élites, appended with new professional groups, were integrated into the colonial economy. To begin with, the Ottoman political patrimonial order implied maintaining a close hand on the prebendal urban élite (the a‘yān) through stipends in the form of land rents. But even though the ownership was formally to the sultan and the state, the notables enjoyed de facto full possession, giving them that special status of a group (Stände) of rentiers without, however, much competition from any local or regional economic group. Even though some of the a‘yān invested in other activities than land, such as trade and manufacturing, land was their prime resource. More importantly, the a‘yān as the prime status group in society was neither an “aristocracy” per se nor assigned any political role within their community, beginning with the city which they were supposed to “represent.” Indeed, Ottoman absolutism precluded the formation of local aristocracies, leaving all “political representation” to the center.

With the colonial nation-state now a reality, that old order was not completely dislodged, but was rather beefed up with all kinds of new forces and realities. To begin with, land rent now intermixed with manufacturing, trade and finance, as the old rentiers have learned how not to make land their sole asset. Secondly, new middle class professional groups, not to mention the nouveaux riches, all of which benefited from the openings of colonialism, and the special attention that the latter accorded to “minorities” (Christians, Armenians, Jews, Kurds and Alawis), were now sharing the benefits of the commercial and manufacturing wealth of the mandate period. Thirdly, the old élites, in conjunction with new entrepreneurial groups, formed political parties, participating in all governmental activities, from the presidency, parliament, and cabinet positions. As a newly formed nation-state, Syria now thought of itself as a territory with internationally acknowledged borders, rather than as a “province” appended to a multi-ethnic empire. But this also implied seeking for a certain degree of homogeneity, which was not there in the world of Empire. The heterogeneous nature of Syrian society was marked by a couple of incongruities. Firstly, the mandate inherited the Ottoman millet system, whereby “communities” lived on their own, in specific neighborhoods of the city, with their own schools, businesses, and “representatives” protecting their rights. Secondly, the nation-state implied the formation of a single political territory, which de facto entailed a minimum degree of cohesiveness among regions. In the Ottoman system, the central axis of the four major predominantly Sunni cities of Damascus, Hims, Hama, and Aleppo, was the one that consolidated the core of the traditional rentier class, the manufacturing of the craft guilds, linking the trade routes and their merchant classes from Jerusalem to Baghdad. With the newly formed nation-state that core economic axis was shared with two additional ones: the western Mediterranean one of Banyas, Jableh, Tartus and Latakia (the predominantly Alawi mountainous and coastal regions), and the northern-eastern one of Hasakeh, Qamishli and Dayr al-Zor. It is safe to say that Syria’s modern history hinges, on the one hand, on the relations between the operational economic hegemony of Sunni and Christian manufacturing and business families, and, on the other, on the imbalance between the central axis of the four major cities and the two regional axes subserved to them.

In a predominantly agrarian society there is that lingering problem of mostly landless peasants, of big “absentee” landlords who invest the bulk of their rents in the city, of lack of adequate infrastructural resources (roads, schools, water and electricity), of peasants being “represented” by their abusive landlords. To elaborate, the power relations are always in favor of the urban areas, but even further, there is that persistent imbalance between the urban axes—the core one of the four major cities, and the ones attached to it by the mandate—which doubles the urban–rural imbalance into one with underdeveloped urban axes.

To proceed a bit rapidly, it is no secret that the structure of the paramilitary factions that downsized the traditional political and economic groups since the 1963 Baath coup, were small to middle class landowners from rural areas. Indeed, the Baath was supposed to bridge that gap between landlord and peasant, city and countryside, the core Sunni axis of the four major cities with the western coastal and mountainous areas, and the north-east. The agrarian reforms of 1963–69 did some of that, by dispossessing big landlords, and transforming peasants into small landlords, with various laws making it harder for the landlord to evict tenant-farmers and laborers. At the same time, the economic assets of what became in the liberal period the “bourgeois middle class” were nationalized in an apparent attempt to consolidate the state monopoly over the economy and its national resources. Quite rapidly, therefore, the early pre-Asad Baath managed to rip off landowning, manufacturing, and financial middle class groups from their core resources, which in itself was a blunt attempt to downgrade them politically in favor of the one-party system that was yet to come. The Syrian paradox—or exception—would consist precisely in the return of the power groups that were weakened in the 1960s. This would take place in the coming couple decades in two different stages. When Hafiz al-Asad assumed power in 1970 in the wake of a coup d’état against his early Baathist companions, he inaugurated what was then dubbed as the “rectification movement,” which in essence meant “correcting” the “extremes” of the early Baath. More concretely, this aimed at a re-opening towards old Sunni and Christian professional groups that always dominated the national economy; but even though they were openly courted to reinvest in core economic sectors (such as textiles, food and chemicals), they did so only reluctantly, leading the whole “rectification movement” into a downward spiral from which it never recovered. The 1979–82 years in particular witnessed a number of urban riots, led by the since then outlawed Muslim Brothers, which culminated in the Hama massacre in 1982, a symptomatic failure of a state-run economy.

The fall of the Berlin Wall and the communist bloc left Syria without the “socialist” protective umbrella that it relied upon since the 1960s. An attempt was made to “liberalize” the economy, this time more realistic than the defunct “reforms” of the 1970s, with “investment law n° 10” in 1991. Herein lies the paradoxical dialectic of contemporary Syrian history: firstly, the return en force since the 1990s of the economic Sunni and Christian middle classes; secondly, the failure of the one-party “socialist” state to reduce imbalances among confessional groups, cities and regions; or to incorporate new emerging groups into its entrepreneurial activities (including the Alawis which are supposedly in control of political power via the Asad clan, but which as a whole are an underclass rather than a privileged group); or to drastically improve the status of the peasantry and the redundant surplus in rural labor. In sum, there is a blatant “return” to the Ottoman and colonial eras, with their dominant professional Sunni and Christian urban groups, which look down at peasants, tribes, and rural areas. In one of those iconic historical twists, which may be at the root of the current uprisings, political power is presently in the hands of groups which originally were small to middle class rural landowners, and whose rural origins seem all too forgotten amid four decades in power; while “real” economic power is back to the groups that were displaced in the 1960s by those who are now holding power. It is such an awkward “sharing” of power between well experienced entrepreneurial ancien régime factions that cannot rule, and the political nouveaux riches, who do not have the required entrepreneurial habitus to be fully integrated into the ranks of the traditional economic class, which now delineates Syria in its civil war.

Bin Ladism long dead

Bin Ladism as an ideology—indiscrimination between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism, jihadism against American imperialism; death to America, the Jewish state, and the Saudi monarchy; and the possibility of an all encompassing Islamic state and umma—may not survive as a totality, assuming there was one. What is important to note is that in their more basic elementary fragments, such elements survive on their own, rather than as a totality, in various areas, and in varying degrees, within the Arab and Islamic worlds. The only thing that Bin Ladism adds to such common sense notions is their actualization in the context of a violent revolutionary struggle. In other words, slogans are redeemed inefficient in their own right—they’re only words—and could only be brought to justice (and to earth) through revolutionary struggle. Hence the jihadism that Bin Laden supported and financed in Afghanistan under the Soviet occupation (1979–1989), the attacks against U.S. embassies and American military and civilians, and, last but not least, the spectacular character of 9/11 (where, for once, reality supersedes fiction), which has set new benchmarks that the Qaida was unable to replicate anymore. It is therefore such revolutionary struggle that sets Bin Ladism apart from the rest—not the fragmentary content of its ideology—and which precisely prevents it from having a strong line of adherents among the Arab and Muslim youth. Moreover, since the Qaida was never set as a territorial organization, the way Hamas and the Hezbollah are, it floats around as a virtual nation-state without any concrete links to a population. Hence the excitement about Bin Ladism has waned rather than accelerated since 9/11, and by the time Bin Laden died this past week, he knew that his Revolution would never materialize. This is not to say that his ideology as a totality or in its fragments is not there anymore. Without the idea of a Global Revolution most of Bin Ladism would be sheer common sense. Bin Laden died not only defeated and isolated (probably “bored,” said the New York Times), but in a home with no connections (not even a phone line or an Internet connection), as if waiting for death to come by, and it finally came by way of the Obama Administration. By contrast, when Saddam Hussein was caught, stood trial, then executed, thanks to a poor coordination between the Bush Administration and the Iraqi federal government, he had plenty to do and was at the height of his powers. In Bin Laden’s unfortunate case, the Grand Revolution looks like a utopianism that was bound to fail and rapidly disappear, while the Baathist power structure, as epitomized by the likes of Saddam Hussein (and Asad, Mubarak, and the rest), is there to stay. Let us not forget that, in spite of the Arab revolts, all the infrastructures of power are still there untouched. By contrast, Bin Ladism, which has built its ideology on nonsensical fragments commonly found in Arab political discourses, had no way to materialize in practice. Bin Laden therefore died like a bored university professor who some time ago produced lots of words, but whose main achievements were decades behind rather than ahead of him. If, as has often been noted, the young who are taking it to the streets in the Arab world are not using anti-imperialist slogans, but are rather coming through with more concrete demands, it is because in most instances they’re not the ones behind state and party organizations; hence the slogans of the protesters are no indication that the Arab political discourse of the modern nation-state is yet shifting in another direction. Caught in a globalized capitalist world, the modern nation-state is unable to set itself into practices that make sense locally, that is, for the disfranchised populations whose per-capita income and modes of living are far off from their counterparts in advanced liberal societies.

Even though president Obama took on his behalf the decision not to publish the photos and videos of Bin Laden’s body with his head and body torn with bullets, what the White House decided to release instead is what ultimately became “the” photo of the event: the group around the president which knew of the Bin Laden operation, and which was able to watch it “live,” with a direct commentary from CIA director Leon Panetta. Ever since the Nuremberg trials, the West has at great pains set for itself the task to prosecute crimes against humanity, wherever these may have occurred. Since then, many of such crimes which have either touched on the peripheries of Europe (Serbia and Kosovo), Africa, and the rest of the world, were also subjected to tough investigations and prosecutions against the persons or groups who committed them. Since groups are impossible to prosecute, it was indeed those who “represented” them that generally stood trial. The idea here is not so much revenge per se, as much as a willingness to “represent” evil, show it, and bring to public life those who are allegedly responsible for such crimes. The important thing here is therefore the publicity of all such operations: instead of the vendetta feuds that were normally in use until World War II, the aim here is to make the process public, whether the hearings where the perpetrators are openly accused of their crimes, the rebuttals by lawyers and culprits, or the decisions themselves by judges and magistrates. Hence within the whole judicial process that became the norm in 19th-century Europe, and which replaced the old system by ordeal, everything has to be carefully examined and judged accordingly. In the case of Bin Laden, the decision was made, which was never admitted as such openly, to bring him dead rather than alive, hence a process à la Nuremberg was out of question, and would have created an impossible process to manage logistically or otherwise. But then justice was rendered, at least in the grand north American tradition, of punishing “the one” who was “known” to be behind the 9/11 massacres and other killings as well. What is still missing in all this, however, is due process and a fair trial, hence the importance of the photo released by the White House. The photo publicizes the decision-making process and provides it with an aura of legitimacy. It does so by humanizing the protagonists-as-decision-makers, beginning with president Obama himself, who appears not only stone-faced, but more importantly, not even as the central character. You’ll have to look well to find him, and there he appears on the edge of the table, as if sitting on his own and oblivious of the others. What the protagonists are watching, we’re unable to see, and we’ll have to make up for such a gap in our minds, as the best of Italian and Iranian neorealism have taught us. We’re nearly sure that they’re watching the operation unfold, but which moment exactly—the decisive one where bin Laden was shot dead?—and does it really matter to know? The photo “works” precisely because it adds suspense to the hors-champs, incorporating the unseen and out-of-frame within the suspended narrative, while capturing le moment décisif (Henri Cartier-Bresson) at a decisive moment that we’re unable to see and determine. The photo, in other words, adds a touch of “realism” in a secretive process, handled, as we can witness, mostly by mid-aged family men whose life was devoted to the Washington belt, but who manage to appear here in their more humane unseen self, like weekend family men and women watching a good TV show. The monstrosity of the act of killing Bin Laden, the precision and ruthlessness with which it was executed, add to the importance of the photo by humanizing the protagonists. Even though the president made the final decision, and was liable for it, it was, indeed, group work that finally mattered (as should be the case in a liberal democracy)—and the photo precisely underscores the collective aspect of the team work. In the absence of a fair trial, had Bin Laden survived, the legitimacy of the killing appears well founded, precisely because of the team work which was publicly revealed thanks to this unique photograph—and to the sublime work of ideology.

The photo was taken on May 1 2011, and uploaded on Flickr a day later:

President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden, along with members of the national security team, receive an update on the mission against Osama bin Laden in the Situation Room of the White House, May 1, 2011. Seated, from left, are: Brigadier General Marshall B. “Brad” Webb, Assistant Commanding General, Joint Special Operations Command; Deputy National Security Advisor Denis McDonough; Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton; and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates. Standing, from left, are: Admiral Mike Mullen, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; National Security Advisor Tom Donilon; Chief of Staff Bill Daley; Tony Binken, National Security Advisor to the Vice President; Audrey Tomason Director for Counterterrorism; John Brennan, Assistant to the President for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism; and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper. Please note: a classified document seen in this photograph has been obscured. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)

Source:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/whitehouse/5680724572/in/photostream

a new third political order?

A postcolonial “second order” was de facto established in west Asia and the middle east in the aftermath of WWII, which replaced the post-Ottoman “first order” that protected the nascent nation-states and their bourgeois middle classes and professional élite groups in the aftermath of the empire’s dismantlement and sudden demise. As it turned out, such groups were doing well and prosperous as long as the French and British colonial order was there to safeguard the middle east from further fragmentation. The 1952 free officers revolution in Egypt and the 1958 Qasim coup against the Hashimites in Iraq were the first indicators of the end of the post-Ottoman colonial bourgeois rule, with all its liberal underpinnings (free press, multi-parties, banking and finance, and family owned industries). By 1963 and the coming of the Baath in Syria and Iraq, the tone was clearly set that we're into "socialism," one-party state rule, secret services, and a preponderant role to the military and their affiliates, which ended up controlling education and major industries. Qaddafi's coup in 1969 against the Idrissi dynasty, the rejuvenation of the Baath in the 1970s under Saddam and Asad, reinforced the trend, while the Iranian revolution in 1978–79 completed the circle of the monolithic state and its military and intelligence apparatuses. So it took three decades after WWII for the political and social “second order” to take shape in west Asia and the middle east. Are the present revolts destined to dismantle that order or consolidate it? The elements that consolidated the old order, and which are still there, came from the rural peripheries and small cities, and were rooted in the military. In the four decades since they've come to power, they've lost touch with their original peripheries, hence what we're witnessing now is the class struggle emerging from large sections of the populations that have been disfavored and marginalized. However, there isn't much of a political program for all those lower classes, which have been joined by fragments of the middle classes that lost their purchasing powers over the years, and young techies that do not fit well into the current societal stalemate. High unemployment and birth rates, inflation of college degrees, the low status of women, and the failure to industrialize, are certainly the main culprits behind the gross failures of the nascent nation-states to modernize and compete with their Asian counterparts. Hence it's a curious combination of elements that are coming together in those street protests, more class- than ethnically-oriented, whose final resolution would take several decades to settle. To be sure, there will be more openings towards more representative political systems (multi-parties etc.), but that won't be enough, hence the possibility of a rigid consolidation if the social forces fail to mature in the right direction. I'm as usual fairly pessimistic, as I don't feel that the region as a whole is yet ready for a mature "liberal" solution.